Anno Zombus Year 1 (Book 9): September by Dave Rowlands Page A

both pleased and irate that I had enlisted the aid of The Puller.  Pleased that we might actually receive some information that we might be able to utilise, irate because she didn’t really want anybody other than those that needed to know involved with either the Terraformers or Mutators.
     
    evening
    The three of us watched the sun descend into the west from the top of Ayer’s Rock in silence.  Apocalypse Mum was pretty insistent that the meeting with Fluffy happen tonight, and wanted me to make certain that it happened.  When I brought out the radio and began scanning the frequencies that the schrandfelths had given me, Apocalypse Girl put her arm around me.  Her mother was more interested in the radio than in glaring at her daughter’s display.  Granted it was something that Smart Guy had cobbled together, several months ago now, that he claimed to be able to reach Jupiter easily enough.
     
    Fluffy replied soon enough, though it was loath to meet so soon, it almost immediately appeared once I requested his presence.  The Boss was taken aback by her first encounter with an extraterrestrial, approaching it cautiously.  When Fluffy extended a hand in greetings she grasped and shook it with almost no hesitation.
     
    “Welcome to Earth,” She began, her voice somewhat shaky.  Fluffy smiled through the fuzz surrounding its mouth.  “According to my daughter and her… companion… your species is one of three…?”  Fluffy agreed with her.  “Is there anything that you can tell me about the other two?”
     
    “Indeed.  Not a lot, but I can tell you a few things.  I have been investigating things since meeting your family, and learned a couple of interesting points.”  Fluffy emitted a smell that reminded me a little of vanilla.  I think it might have farted, judging from the expression on its face.  Not that it was easy to read a schrandfelths , not in the slightest. 
     
    “Anything that you can help with would be most welcome,” Apocalypse Mum told it.  “And if you have any technology that we might be able to use that you feel you are able to give us, even just lend us…”
     
    “NO!” Fluffy almost shouted.  “I will not give you technology that your species is unready for, besides our species has nothing that you might even want.  It is all designed for planetary exploration and sanitation.  Some mining tools.  I cannot offer you our teleport technology either, as it is not ours to give.  It belongs to the Highest.”
     
    “Who, or what, is the Highest?” Apocalypse Girl wanted to know.
     
    “It is a being of unsurpassed power, my friend.  It rules the Hierarchy under which we schrandfelths merely serve.  Even those that you call Terraformers and Mutators are servant to the Will of the Highest.”  Fluffy sounded almost as if it was educating a small child of something obvious, like the sun being yellow.  “What I can offer is this, your species is clearly more resilient than other examples of humanity that we have encountered throughout the cosmos.  This means that there are far more of you surviving this mess with the Dead than anybody expected.  On any other world we would have seen you wiped out entirely by now, but here, on this Earth of yours… it may be that an appeal to the Highest would result in it declaring the Earth a sanctuary for your kind.  I will investigate this avenue further for you.  It is the least I can do for those that saved my life.”  It smiled at Apocalypse Girl and myself, bade us farewell, and vanished into nothingness as The Boss was about to speak.
     
    “So now we must rely on alien politics?” Apocalypse Mum did not look remotely happy about the prospect.  “And what was it talking about, humanity on other worlds?”
     
    I told her that we’d find out all of these things, in time.  Surely, we will.

September 10 th Year 1 A.Z.
    morning
    Sleep and I were not friendly last night.  I kept having visions of schrandfelths and